A Distributed Content Repositories Model and a Decisions Support System for Learning Objects in Latin-America

This paper describes a content object and metadata repositories model, which provides an alternative to search and to access repositories developed in Colombia and Latin America. Along with the repositories model, an initial design of a decision support system for repositories is presented. In order to preserve the autonomy of each repository, a common web services interface is considered. This interface can be implemented on different software platforms or operating systems, and it also can be integrated within existing solutions. The repositories that accomplish with the services interface are based in IMS DRI 1.0 and SCORM 1.2, and they will have an internal catalogue that manages the content objects, their associated metadata and other catalogues for the development of distributed operations. By the other hand, the decision support system is a tool that provides the information required to evaluate and to control the quality of both the services and the resources offered by the repositories, among other parameters. The development of the decision support system will require technologies such as Data Warehouses and On Line Analytic Processing. At a technical level, this document describes a relational database model which allows manipulating the learning object metadata stored in a content repository, no matters if the database engine supports XML or not. According to the relational model, the tables, their functional description and their relationships are presented. Finally, the dimensional models of the decision support system and the web interface offered by the current repository implementation are described.